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FILM-PHILOSOPHY  2003

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Subject:

Nolley on TV journalism

From:

[log in to unmask]

Reply-To:

Film-Philosophy Salon <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:07:12 +0100

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From:    Kenneth S Nolley <[log in to unmask]>
Original Sender: H-NET List for Scholarly Studies and Uses of Media <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Review of Seeing is Believing

Seeing Is Believing:  Handicams, Human Rights & the News.  Produced by
Katerina Cizek and Peter Wintonick for Necessary Illusions.  New York:
First Run/Icarus Films, 2002.  58 minutes.  (VHS)

One of the interesting developments in documentary practice of the last
two decades has been the development of the camcorder and its widespread
adoption by private citizens.  Perhaps the Rodney King footage in 1991
first revealed to the general public the political power of this new
little machine.  In the last few years, camcorders have captured any
number of dramatic moments, including most sensationally perhaps,  the
destruction of the World Trade Center.  Indeed, in the public imagination,
the twin towers have dominated the public imagination of 9/11 far more
than the Pentagon and the fourth plane which crashed in Pennsylvania, in
significant measure perhaps, because there were no camcorders trained on
these sites at critical moments.

Cizek and Wintonick’s film is overtly dedicated to exploring what one
journalist in the film calls the greatest technological shift since the
Industrial Revolution.  Certainly the film is marked by the extraordinary
amount of gripping amateur video that it contains, a good deal of which
comes from a human rights campaign in the Philippines in support of the
efforts being made by a group of indigenous peoples, the Nakamata, to
regain the use of ancestral lands.  Central to the campaign is an engaging
and courageous videographer named Joey Lozano, who documents the Nakamata
struggle and during the film helps them to learn to shoot their own video
view of their plight.  The hardware is made available to the Nakamata
through Joey by a New York group called Witness, who are dedicated to
providing handicams to human rights campaigns.

The story as told by the film presents the Nakamata struggle with
acceptance and sympathy, even as it develops an heroic portrait of Joey
Lozano, for its sympathies clearly lie with people who have been
traditionally disempowered.  In the main, it seems clear that the film
seeks to argue that the handicam is a critical tool of non-violent
resistance for marginalized peoples, though its also raises other
questions about the utility and power of this new magical box.

Certainly the film reveals some of the difficulties that traditional
television journalism has with amateur film in the comments made by
television journalist George Alajiah and documentarian Leslie Woodhead,
both British, who worry on camera about ways that handicam footage might
be seen as a substitute for what they believe it is that professionals do
better.  And the film points toward other questions raised by the
burgeoning employment of the medium.

In addition to the applications of handicam footage with which the film
seems generally sympathetic (as in making the case for the Nakamata in the
Philippines, in documenting atrocities in the Congo, or revealing abusive
care of the mentally ill in Mexico, and so on), the film also notes other
uses of handicam footage which is seen either by the narrator or by
participants in the film as negative and potentially dangerous (the
right-to-life footage of the in utero fetus, video release statements by
Osama Bin Laden, films of suicide bombers’ last moments that are referred
to as “snuff film” by a participant, recruiting films for right-wing
paramilitary groups or terrorist organizations, and  arrestingly, the
intimidating image of a neo-nazi youth in Prague with a handicam shooting
footage of  Ondraj Cakl, a videographer featured in the film for his work
in documenting the violent activities of skinhead youths).  Though the
film does not argue so directly, it seems to suggest implicitly that the
handicam itself is merely a powerful tool for any ideological position.

The film also points out that all documentary footage, even the  most
dramatic, is subject to interpretative dispute, as noted wryly in the film
by Alan Tieger, who helped prosecute the first Rodney King trial.  Beyond
these issues, the film raises the question of whether the handicam might
actually endanger certain lives (of the Nakamata, particularly) more than
it protects them.  But the film does not ask another cogent question
here—about the impact of omnipresent, ever-vigilant handicams upon
personal privacy, a subject much discussed recently with regard to cameras
on college campuses.

In short, the film seems to me to raise far more questions than it
answers, perhaps to beg some important questions, and  quietly to stack
the deck in favor of certain applications of the apparatus, even as it
appears to dismiss others as flawed or pernicious.

At the same time, the mere fact that the film engages the notion of
oppressed third world peoples as film-makers, as observers looking back
through a lens at the first world, is significant and novel enough to make
this film a particularly engaging piece of work, and even the unanswered
questions that arise out of the film are important ones for documentary
practice.  This is a film that I shall strongly consider using in the
course I teach on documentary film.  It would be a significant and useful
acquisition for collections supporting documentary studies.


--
Ken Nolley
Professor of English
Willamette University
Salem, OR 97301
Phone: 503-370-6280
Fax: 503-370-6944

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